The Seven Keys to Doomsday

A special audio adaptation of the Doctor Who stageplay from the 1970s. The Doctor takes his companions Jenny and Jimmy to the planet Karn where they must locate the seven crystal keys. If they fail the Daleks will unleash their evil on the universe!

2 Comments

Tanlee
on May 7, 2016 at 8:14 PM

“Where’s my sonic screwdriver?”

The Ultimate Adventure really had me wondering if adapting the Stageplays was a good idea at all, given that it was one release that seemed to completely undo all the good work that Big Finish had done to build a believable, consistent universe. It’s hard to imagine Big Finish doing something like this before the New Series, back when Big Finish was living the dream of many fans to have Doctor Who as a truly adult, dark series made exclusively for us. But with the New Who revival, fandom seemed forced to accept that Doctor Who was a children’s show after all, and of course there was a chance to bank on Doctor Who’s renewed interest and the nostalgia of those casual fans of the 80’s who remember seeing the Ultimate Adventure stageplay but had never bothered with the audios before, and might not even have thought about Doctor Who much before the 2005 revival. And with The Ultimate Adventure’s release, fandom was effectively told yet again to treat it as a bit of light fun for the kiddies and nothing more and to enjoy it for what it was. Typical of fandom’s current anti-intellectualism and forced enjoyment and praise of mediocrity.

For all its potential to be so much more, Doctor Who is at heart a children’s show that’s easily prone to childish silliness and falling back on being simply ‘brand’ television, as well as a complete absence of quality control, and The Ultimate Adventure, like Creature From the Pit and Time & The Rani represent the most extreme, excessive and in some ways sobering affirmations of this fact. This fact is unavoidable unless of course the show had ended with City of Death, or if some 2000 years from now the only surviving records of the show were a time capsule containing only the top ten stories of the recent DWM poll- or if you prefer only the top ten Classic Who stories. But maybe at the same time if the show can be something as asinine as a children’s pantomime show alongside its past achievements then there really are no limits to what the show can do or be. Unfortunately we expected a higher standard for the audios and The Ultimate Adventure seemed to bring everything crashing down, and it’s enormously hard to reckon with it as part of Big Finish’s full-blooded block-universe. Sometimes I wonder if The Ultimate Adventure was the real wrecker of the Big Finish range, breaking its magic spell, embracing the regressive side of nostalgia, subjecting everything special about the audios to the shallowing reductionism of the 80’s, leaving only a hollow, plastic shell of its former glory.

So given how much better Seven Keys to Doomsday comes off as both a story and an adaptation, perhaps I let The Ultimate Adventure off easily for something that could and should have been up to the same high standard as this, but at the same time it affirms that the Stageplay adaptations can be something really special when done right. Like The Ultimate Adventure, this still bears the hallmarks of Terrance Dicks’ parochial writing tone and his rather asinine concessions to audio, but it’s done with enough care and love that it succeeds magnificently. What Terrance has written was typical sci-fi pulp fodder, but written whilst he was in his prime and when his ideas and imagination was fresh, and it sounds just as fresh today. Seven Keys to Doomsday is a reminder that there genuinely was a time before the 1980’s when Doctor Who was treated with nothing less than the utmost respect by its makers, and that it wasn’t just a rose-tinted myth, no matter what the New Who cheerleaders or JNT era apologists might say.

That’s the main difference between this and The Ultimate Adventure- in that story Terrance was writing little more than a homework assignment to a typical JNT shopping list which favoured glitter over substance, but here he’s writing strictly from the soul without such shallow constraints. There’s a real joy in exploring the world of Karn in audio, and how Terrance’s imagination has rendered this world with strange wonders and horrors. This was written in 1974 (you can spot elements of The Green Death, Death to the Daleks and Planet of the Spiders in it), and this was a good two years before Terrance would revisit his imagined world of Karn in The Brain of Morbius. This is more or less the same world, an aged, ancient world straight out of horror fiction of perpetual darkness illuminated by ghostly moonlight, a world of the undead, immortal beings that clung to life even when their bodies had decayed to mere bones. Unlike in Brain of Morbius, this doesn’t really evolve into a theme about social development or the dangers of immortality in preserving the reactionary dark ages of the past as something permanent, entropic and inescapable and forbidding any progress. But nonetheless the haunted, uninviting atmosphere is there, and really makes the journey of the brave heroes into their worst fears and demons feel genuinely personal and cathartic.

Where The Ultimate Adventure occasionally drags, this takes appreciative pauses at a world that deserves appreciation. Whilst the companions in The Ultimate Adventure became embroiled in the Tardis by awful contrivance, here it’s by genuine impulsiveness on the part of the characters. That’s partly because The Ultimate Adventure was conceived as an action-orientated romp, which is why the talky bits were so functional and dragging. Seven Keys to Doomsday feels far more like a proper theatre horror story that’s all about mood and environment, so the slower pacing is perfect for it’s sense of trepid caution and conveys a sense of treating its narrative environment with delicate respect, and the dialogue really becomes something world building, drawing out the history of Karn and the long plight of its people. We still get characters given to ‘look at that elaborate fight scene that’s happening over there’ type dialogue, but done with far better acting so that the observational reactions sound sincere and smooth, and performed in a way that keeps the listener hooked on the details, as if they’re hearing a beautiful painting being described in sensual detail. There’s a real tenderness to the storytelling here. It benefits heavily from being played straight as drama and in some places it’s downright melancholy.

It’s here of course that the long debate comes up about whether Doctor Who benefits better from the humorous approach or being played completely serious and straight. Ideally Doctor Who should be humoured enough to be approachable, but serious enough that the viewer can suspend their disbelief, despite the show’s budgetary limitations. Many fans complained that during the Williams era, the show’s humour and indulgence frequently undermined the drama and played so much to the camera that it broke down the fourth wall. What they wanted was a more serious approach, believing it would make the stories more disciplined and sharp and suspenseful, and that’s what the pretentiously humourless JNT era was praised for, despite featuring some of the most incoherent, obfuscational and schizophrenic plotless disaster zone stories in the show’s history, as the show degenerated into plotless inane vulgarity. New Who was supposedly the solution to this, bringing the show back to the popular and humorous Tom Baker days, but by adding comical lines or moments in the middle of dramatic scenes, it was brutally jarring and made the show seem simply insecure and desperate. And now Big Finish have followed suite in filling their latest audio stories with comedy moments to appeal to new fans, but at the cost of diluting the story and neutering its bite. So it’s something of a relief that the stageplays are treated as sacrosanct with no-one tampering with the original script or taking away its edge. What we have here is completely the author’s own work, so no-one’s forcing artificial laughs into it to undermine the drama. It’s a good thing that Big Finish haven’t been trying to make this story more popularised, because in its original form it is a timelessly accessible, simple story that could effectively have worked as a second pilot for a revived series, or even a feature film since I’d venture that it’s story is big enough for cinema. Infact it’s possibly Big Finish’s most accessible release next to Blood of the Daleks and the first two seasons of Dalek Empire, and that’s what makes this story classic and worthy of being stuck on a desert island with.

It seems that without humour, there’s no charm, but that’s not necessarily the case. If there was a point where the show worked without humour, it would have to be the first season of the show back in 1963, which is pretty much what Seven Keys to Doomsday is modelled on. The charm was there because of the sense of a warm family dynamic to the protagonists, and because they really believed they had been transported far from home to wondrous and frightening new worlds. This takes the Doctor Who idea back to basics. Jimmy and Jenny are a younger Ian and Barbara, a couple who literally represent the audience and are unwilling travellers with the Doctor, thrust against their will into this nightmarish adventure. The important thing is they are written and played as real people, with strong acting on both sides and Charlie Hayes as Jenny doing particularly good work, clearly bringing to the production her inherited love for Doctor Who from her mother Wendy Padbury (she also clearly enjoyed playing an imposter Dalek). They also represent the warmth at the heart of this desolate and cold wider universe. Big Finish did receive comments about the chauvinistic attitudes of this story, but the point is that it recreates an authentic sense of the family values of the time. This is a family that’s realistically patriarchal and where the man of the household is uncompromisingly protective of the fairer sex, and he does so out of love as much as chauvinism. At the same time though, Jenny often shows herself to be the stronger, more mature character when having to bang The Doctor and Jimmy’s heads together whenever they’re arguing and competing with each other over who’s the alpha male.

As the story goes on, the heartbreaking sense of abandonment and homesickness amidst these uprooted travellers in a perpetually threatening alien world as the fight gets more relentless, the nightmare becomes unending and the possibility of ever getting home seems further and further away from reach, really starts getting under the listener’s skin, just like in the early days of the show. The Doctor in question is very close to the Hartnel incarnation, crochety, rude and untrustworthy, redefined as the stranger again, but there’s also a loneliness to him that influences his gradual fondness and warmth towards his companions. There are of course hints of Pertwee as well, with lip service paid to venusian karate, being sent by remote control onto errands by the Time Lords, and the Doctor this time starting life as the moral hero from the outset, risking his life and fighting for the greater utilitarian good, whilst condemning the humans for their violence. But it’s the Doctor’s sense of utilitarianism that makes him untrustworthy in dragging Jimmy and Jenny into this dangerous conflict out of a belief that all their lives are expendable for the greater safety of the galaxy, and so the arguing and mistrust and tested loyalty all comes beautifully to a dramatic head rather than being the kind of gratuitously contrived artificial bitching that Eric Saward tried to pass for drama. Trevor Martin’s performance really puts a stamp on the role, making it his own fully fledged character and performs with gravitas, dignity and warmth as though the pulverising of the Doctor’s dignity during the JNT years never happened, making this at times feel like an Unbound adventure and making us wish he could have been given an official turn as the Doctor.

And it’s this no nonsense approach to the drama and to the characters that makes the suspense and the tests of character really sharp and outstanding. Jimmy’s first encounter with a Dalek is very tense stuff, aided by the way the Dalek’s ferociousness breaks the eerie serenity. The rather manipulative scene where Jenny is inside a Dalek casing and seemingly gets blasted when the Daleks discover the imposter is genuinely harrowing, and comparing it to the way The Ultimate Adventure pilfers the same scene only brings home how much more believable and devastating it is here. The scene where the resistance fighters are about to execute Tara for her treachery feels genuinely brutal, which only makes the Doctor’s plea for mercy and compassion all the more affirming and beautiful, as if representing hope of a better life than all this constant killing and in-fighting to a broken, defeated people. Although the story is somewhat parochial and pulp, with its traitor character being a familiar trope of the genre, there’s something humanistic and progressive about the portrayal here, in asking us to empathise with the reviled figure and understand her motivations, much like how Dalek Empire did. All these things combine to make the story and the journey one in which the unwilling and protesting companions get to apply their forthright convictions into a heroic cause, where the Doctor really does engage into a battle of wits with his enemies, Tara faces her guilt for her treachery and manages to redeem herself, the human resistance who have known only defeat and death are shown how to grasp victory from the jaws of defeat by the Doctor’s hopeful presence and likewise the finale really feels like a climax because it’s the point where things really get personal between the Doctor and the Emperor Dalek in such a way that the Daleks’ folly is shown to be one of foolish pride and the climax feels genuinely emotionally satisfying. This is all about entering the caves and facing your darkest fears and conquering them, like the Buddhist tales of facing fears or Greek myths about battling the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, and the serious nature of the drama and dark atmosphere only makes the final victory that bit more gratifying and beautiful, as does the strict dramatic discipline that beautifully polarises tenderness and sharpness. Indeed to return this to the Williams era debate, we can look at Horns of Nimon as being a similar template for what this story does, in using graceful, eerie minimalism to tell a story of decayed empires, and shows that if Horns of Nimon had that bit extra put into it, had it been played straight and really drawn on its Greek mythology to tell a story about personal demons being reckoned with, then it could have been a far stronger story for it, maybe even a classic.

Despite my usual complaints about the ‘making of’ extras on the main line releases, I don’t mind their presence on the Stage Plays releases, since they have a reason to be on there to chart the history of the original production and the reminiscence of those who were there at the event. Infact the ‘making of’ extras on The Ultimate Adventure were arguably much more entertaining than the story itself. But whilst the extras on The Ultimate Adventure betrayed a rather cynical view of the story as a bit of nonsense for undemanding kids, the extras here reveal a far more fond recollection of the story, which in some ways explains the differences in how they were produced. The Ultimate Adventure seemed like it was almost treated as a necessary and unchallenging chore for those involved with making it, but this on the other hand seems to have been crafted and performed with nothing less than the utmost care and love, like a rediscovered treasure carefully and patiently reconstructed with the most careful and tender hands. Ultimately this is up there with Brain of Morbius and Horror of Fang Rock as one of Terrance Dick’s finest Doctor Who stories, and the final proof is in the pudding. If, at the end of it all when Jimmy and Jenny have been returned home, you’re not on Jenny’s side when she’s coaxing Jimmy to agree to go on another trip with the Doctor together, then you have no soul.

I can’t speak for the motives behind the Doctor Who stageplays, but unlike “The Ultimate Adventure,” which seemed to be designed to glorify the series’s past, “The Seven Keys to Doomsday” appears to be an “honest” attempt to translate Doctor Who to the stage. It’s not entirely serious, but it’s free of the baffling musical sequences and out-there whimsy of its successor — and while it may not have played as well to a live audience, it’s certainly more successful in audio translation.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that I can add in the way of analysis. It’s a Terrance Dicks script, meaning that it’s a solidly-plotted runaround with the depth of a dry pond — this isn’t a bad thing, of course, but it doesn’t lend itself to commentary. The plot is straightforward: the Daleks seek to collect seven crystals in order to assemble a doomsday weapon, and the Doctor and his companions must race to stop them before it’s too late. If this sounds remarkably similar to Terry Nation’s “The Keys of Marinus,” well, the similarities don’t stop there, as almost every cliché from the Nation Dalek stories is faithfully reproduced. I’m sure you can guess how things end up — there are no surprises along the way.

However, the plot is not the main attraction. This play was unique in that it cast a completely new actor — Trevor Martin — in the title role, even going so far as to establish that he regenerated from Jon Pertwee. Sadly, with Pertwee no longer with us, such a transition is impossible to record, so Dicks reworks his script and Nicholas Briggs takes up the brief mantle of the “third Doctor” before regenerating at the start. Martin, for his part, is surprisingly good as the Doctor, totally commanding the play from the moment he takes the stage. It’s fascinating to see how a 1974 “Unbound” Doctor is portrayed: there hasn’t yet been a Tom Baker, and so there are no overtly alien qualities in this Doctor as written. Instead, Martin portrays him as an amalgamation of Hartnell and Pertwee — this Doctor is driven and confident, and surprisingly not too far away from the David Warner Doctor of “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Masters of War.” The two companions, Jenny (Charlie Hayes) and Jimmy (Joe Thompson), are completely unmemorable — but it’s neat to point out that Hayes is the daughter of Wendy Padbury, who played Jenny in the original stage performance after her TV turn as Zoe. More Daleks are present, of course, and Briggs’s voices are as effective as ever.

This is basically a capsule review of a two-hour play, but I find myself with virtually nothing to say about it. “The Seven Keys to Doomsday” is most valuable as a historical document: this is what Doctor Who was in 1974, and it’s a rare opportunity indeed to get an authentic “new” story from the time. It’s also an opportunity to hear a new actor putting his stamp on the role. No, it’s not a great piece of drama, but I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a glimpse into the history of the series.